


Do No Harm

by linguamortua



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, Falling In Love, M/M, Pining, Romance, Secret Crush, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 14:25:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19007617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: Nate's reached Baghdad; huge, chaotic, anticlimactic. While everyone else is mentally packing up their baggage ready to go home, Nate's transfixed by the lawless horror of a city ready to ignite.It's enough to make him feel like a monster all over again. And the sarcastic doctor at the aid hospital, Dr Bryan, isn't making him feel any better about his life choices lately.Nate's been trained to extract and evacuate civilians, and he wants Dr Bryan and his staff out of the hospital before shit gets really messy. But how can Nate save someone who doesn’t want to be saved? And what happens when they go their separate ways?





	Do No Harm

**Author's Note:**

> This is the most self-indulgent and filthy thing I've ever written. I have no explanation or excuse for how this happened.

When Nate heard the news, he almost spontaneously combusted with rage. He thought he couldn’t get any angrier, that the stupidity and mendacity and waste was as bad as it could ever be. And then Mike took him aside and gently, soberly, broke the news to him.

A bunch of civilian doctors from an aid agency had set up shop in a hospital down the road, right in the middle of Baghdad’s shittiest and most bombed-out district. No running water, no electricity, no protection from the hordes of men roaming the streets every night with firearms: nothing. When questioned by Alpha, they had announced their intention to stay, and their disinclination to receive assistance from the United States Marine Corps. Strong words, Mike explained, had been exchanged. Alpha Company were routed; the civilians were staying put.

‘Are they insane?’ Nate asked, wondering, in fact, if he was the one who’d finally lost it.

‘Yup,’ said Mike. ‘Guess they are. You wanna go talk to them?’

‘No,’ said Nate quietly, so that his shitty attitude wouldn’t carry to the men. But he grabbed his notebook and his SAW anyway, and followed Mike out into the blazing sun. They scooped up their team and made their rattling way through the streets, Mike squinting at a paper map folded over the top of the steering wheel. As they navigated the roads, locals came up to the humvee asking for water, or pharmaceuticals, or pointing at houses and explaining that the Americans should do something about this man, that woman, these people. Children ran alongside until their little legs couldn’t keep up, yelling and waving.

‘Here,’ Mike said eventually, when Nate was sure that he was about to expire from the force of the sun. His eyes were watering with tiredness and the relentless light. They pulled up.

‘Stay here,’ Nate said. Mike, you’re with me.’

In the hospital courtyard, work had been going on. The walls were faded white-dust, chalky with age and with the remnants of red and green paint still visible. All the debris and crumbled bricks had been stacked in a corner, and an old dumpster had been dragged in and parked up against a wall. Nate saw yellow and orange plastic bags in there, marked with biohazard symbols. As they crossed the courtyard, an orderly came out and threw two more bags in. One of them seemed heavy; Nate tried not to think why.

There was a temporary water tank by the doors. The thinnest patch of dampness underneath a spout on the side indicated that, somehow, against the odds, they were managing to find water to fill it.  
They passed through the doors, propped open with a brick each. The waiting area was busy and loud, but everyone was sitting or lying patiently, talking or crying or soothing. Men and women in scrubs passed back and forth. He and Mike glanced at each other, almost telepathic by now, and settled their SAWs into their elbows, on alert. Who knew who was hiding out in here.

Absurdly, Nate wished Meesh was there. Okay, maybe he wasn't that desperate. He remembered to breathe. It was going to be fine. 

He stopped a young man with a stethoscope around his neck and blue gloves on.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asked. The guy pulled his arm away and carried on towards a woman cradling a baby. The child was fretfully crying, kicking its spidery legs. Even Nate could tell it looked too thin, too weak. He tried again, with a matronly, round-faced woman in a cheerful pink headscarf and matching scrubs with a long tunic. ‘Excuse me, is there someone here who speaks English?’

‘Yeah,’ said the woman in a thick Boston accent. ‘Half the staff.’

‘Great,’ said Nate. ‘I need to speak with whoever’s in charge here.’

‘You want Dr Bryan,’ said the woman. ‘He’s probably down the hall in pediatric.’ She gestured along a corridor, and then crouched down next to an old man lying on the ground. A teenage boy was cradling the man’s head in his lap, face tearstained. Nate was dismissed. He and Mike headed down the hall. Nate hated this; had a crawling feeling down his back. A place like this was a target. A place like this was a hideout for fedayeen who didn’t want to be rounded up.

There were temporary signs on the wall in English, French and Arabic.

‘Pediatrics,’ said Mike, pointing. They poked their heads around the door. The room was large and filled with crying children at eight separate aid stations. For the past several months, Nate had known exactly where to be at all times. Now he was faced with a well-oiled machine in which he had no part. It didn’t feel right.

‘Looking for Dr Bryan,’ he called into the room. A few people looked over at him, disinterested. Then Mike stuck two grimy fingers in his mouth and whistled with earsplitting volume. Chatter in the room subsided.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ A guy appeared next to Mike, face thunderous. He was wearing scrubs and a bandana, and a pair of latex gloves. With his frown, his moustache and a general attitude of high-handed authority, he looked like a dick. He was shorter than Nate but somehow carried himself like he was taller; Nate was not petty enough to entertain that thought for any longer than the fleeting moment that it skittered across his conscious mind.

‘You’re Dr Bryan?’ Nate asked, trying to sound very calm and pleasant to make up for Mike’s whistling him over like a dog.

‘Like I told the other guy, we have work to do,’ said the doctor bluntly, before Nate could even introduce himself.

‘I respect that,’ said Nate, ‘but you can’t stay here. It’s not safe.’

‘Really?’ the doctor said, opening his eyes very wide. ‘That’s a great tactical analysis.’

Nate sighed internally. You had to be nice to civilians. Belatedly, he started from the top. ‘I’m Lieutenant Fick. I’m with Bravo Company.’ He hoped using the guy’s name would build rapport. It was important to build rapport. His father and the Corps were uniquely aligned in this matter.

The guy folded his arms across his chest. He looked incongruously strong for a doctor.

‘We’re working our way down the alphabet,’ observed Bryan sourly. ‘Only twenty-four more of you to go, then.’

This time, Nate sighed out loud. ‘This is a war zone,’ he tried. ‘There’s no security for you here, and there have been reports of skirmishes and artillery fire at night. We don’t know who’s doing it, and haven’t been cleared to intervene. I can’t leave you out here alone.’

‘I’ll take that into consideration,’ said Bryan, in exactly the same tone that Nate used with a superior officer when he wanted the conversation to stop.

There was a scuffle of activity suddenly, orderlies rushing past the door to pediatrics with a stretcher. A thin arm hung off the edge. A woman started to cry out in confusion; someone ran to talk to her. Then there were more people coming in the door, seven or eight people with small children in their arms. Nate registered a lot of blood. The room began scrambling into action, and Bryan’s attention shifted away from Nate as if he had melted away into the background.

‘Jesus,’ Nate said. ‘Is it like this every day?’

Bryan looked at Nate like he just admitted to public masturbation. ‘Yeah,’ he said curtly. ‘That’s what happens when you call in airstrikes on busy metropolitan areas. They didn’t teach you that at Quantico?’

_It’s different in the field,_ Nate wanted to say. Instead, he put his notebook back in his pocket and took out his map.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘For the time being we’re stationed here, at the factory. If shit gets bad, get your people out and to us. We’ll keep you safe.’

Bryan’s face morphed into a look of such naked hostility that Nate almost recoiled. ‘Get the fuck out of my hospital,’ he said softly, but with a terrible, precise enunciation.

Nate left.

 

* * *

 

‘You can’t leave them out there alone,’ said Captain Schwetje.

‘No, sir,’ agreed Nate.

‘There’s bad guys out there,’ said Schwetje.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Nate.

‘It looks bad for us if civilians die on our watch,’ Schwetje said, his whole face crumpling up in concentration as he managed the complex, polysyllabic _civilians_. _No it won’t,_ Nate thought. _It’ll look bad if white civilians die on our watch._

‘Sir, if we could just get out to patrol at night—’

‘Negative, Lieutenant,’ said Schwetje. ‘Godfather says no, so it’s a no. It’s too dangerous.’

Nate wanted to fling his hands up in the air like he was debating someone in college and ask how the fuck any of Schwetje’s logic worked. Frankly, he feared the answer.

‘Any truth to the rumours we’re moving again tomorrow?’ Nate asked. If he could collect enough puzzle pieces, maybe he could solve the puzzle.

‘Yeah, we’ll be in an old office block a klik north,’ Schwetje said. ‘Patrol will cover to the north and east of our current position.’

The hospital was to the south.

‘I’ll take my team out early, before we relocate,’ Nate said. ‘See what I can do.’ He suspected there was nothing he could do. But he couldn’t shake the sight of the locals packed into the crumbling building, patiently waiting for whatever medical care a scratch team could offer with precious few resources. A single misplaced mortar shell could kill dozens. Hundreds, if the building came down around them. Nate didn’t know if he could live with that on his conscience. He wasn’t sure his conscience would take any more weight without collapsing in on itself.

Schwetje gave him curt permission, and then disappeared to do whatever it was he did when he wasn’t ruining Nate’s day.

Before dawn, Nate bolted between humvees with unseemly speed, trying to round up his team to get out to the hospital. As he hassled Person into the driver’s seat of his humvee, Patterson appeared behind him.

‘Nate,’ he said. ‘New location.’ He handed Nate a slip of paper, a poorly printed map. ‘We’re oscar mike in thirty.’

Nate groaned internally, but he acknowledged the order. ‘Change of plan!’ he called, and they convoyed up with the rest of Bravo. The new location was about as shitty as the old one. This time they had a brick wall surrounding a small compound, which Nate guessed was a moderate improvement. But the back wall was crumbling away, and some pipe under the cluster of outhouse building had burst so the whole place reeked of shit and mildew. Downgrade.

Leaving things in Brad’s generally capable hands, Nate reluctantly hauled himself to the briefing and listened to Ferrando spin them fairy tales about the General. The vitriol of his own internal assessment surprised Nate momentarily. He consciously made sure that none of his distaste showed on his face. He was sick of Iraq. The physical discomfort and the particular invasion and these commanding officers had all blended together into a situational irritation like a stone in Nate’s boot.

The result of the briefing: there was no news. There were no orders. They were to sit tight, leave the compound only in daylight, and pretend that there was something, anything, they could do to help the civilian population.

‘Sir,’ Nate asked, suddenly inspired. ‘I’d like to round up a couple of our corpsmen and offer what medical care we can to the local kids.’

‘Humanitarian work isn’t what we came here to do,’ Godfather said. ‘The General has been explicit about the need for us to keep our edge.’ That figured, thought Nate. There was no glory in it. Godfather smiled. ‘With that said, I recognise the need to build trust with the locals. Do it, Lieutenant Fick.’

‘Yessir,’ said Nate, before Godfather could change his mind or issue any unfortunate caveats. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Nate spent the morning standing around cradling his SAW and watching the street, looking back and forth with only half of his mind on it. Behind him, two corpsmen and the company surgeon applied dressings, administered medication, offered advice through the language barrier and rehydrated kids. There was only minor grumbling from his team. By this point, even Brad was too worn down to bitch. Nate let them whine almost out of his earshot, and stood watch. He hoped that nobody remembered him getting a bee in his bonnet about the softening effect of humanitarian work not two weeks ago.

Mike came up beside him and leaned in close. ‘Still worried about us losing our combat readiness, Nate?’ Nate closed his eyes and tried to stop his smile breaking through.

‘Thanks for reminding me about my chronic lack of consistency,’ he said.

‘Keeping you honest, sir,’ Mike told him, and patrolled on down the road with his usual easy lope. Honesty, thought Nate. Now, there was a concept.

By early afternoon, word of their makeshift medical outpost had spread. Nate’s corpsmen were casting wary eyes at an increasingly agitated crowd. There were so many women and children that Nate couldn’t risk any violence. Too easy for a kid to get trampled in a crush. He and Mike conferred by the humvee, Nate keen to egress before the situation got dicey, Mike wondering if they couldn’t stay another hour.

‘Even a half hour would get another dozen kids treated,’ he said, his face pulled down unhappily. Mike was a sucker for kids. Nate, feeling like an asshole, used it against him.

‘Half an hour might see a riot that gets a dozen kids killed,’ he countered.

‘Hell, why even _ask_ for my opinion,’ Mike drawled rhetorically, shaking his head. It was a retort that Nate accepted from Mike. The guy was correct, and anyway, he was already on his way to the corpsmen to get them squared away and ready to move. As they peeled off in their humvees, the crowd banged on the vehicles and shouted, holding out hands, waving documents, begging, accusing. Nate stared straight ahead.

 

* * *

 

By the next day, in the usual turnaround, Nate was ordered to the hospital once more. What would have been simple the previous morning now involved sending his humvees through a series of narrow, winding streets with convenient potential sniper spots all around. This far out, they had no cover from their own snipers and nobody had swept the buildings.

It didn’t escape Nate’s notice that nobody was sending Patterson or Schwetje to deal with this shit. Hell, Ferrando himself could have put in an appearance. Perhaps rank could carry the argument. Nate wondered what it was about him that made him the poster boy for military-civilian relations. He thought about asking Mike, but decided he wouldn’t like the answer.

With Mike by his side, he made his way through the hospital corridors looking for Dr Bryan. Eventually they found him in an office at the back of the building, where three desks and chairs had been pushed to the walls so that all the staff could congregate. From the hall, they watched the doctors stand around talking in twos and threes. Then Nate saw Bryan, deep in conversation with a woman whose eyebrows and mouth both turned down sadly at the corners like an unloved spaniel. Hand gestures and Bryan’s emphatic nodding; the woman finally nodded back and took out a notebook to write something down.

Bryan made a wheels up gesture with his hand and whistled, and the doctors slowly converged on him around the flipchart at the end of the room. They moved stiffly, yawning. One young doctor, heavily pregnant, rubbed at the small of her back. She barely looked old enough to be pregnant, let alone a doctor. For a minute they all stood in silence, waiting for Bryan to say something. He sighed heavily and looked out the window. There was a line of dried blood on his jaw and he flaked it off with his fingernail and inspected it.

‘Guys,’ he said finally, ‘what if we just took today off and let all the babies die?’

Nate gaped, wondering if he was actually asleep in his grave, or in the throes of some waking nightmare in his humvee. The room was dead silent. And then, one by one, the medics all broke into a horrible, high-pitched laughter, rigid with the kind of terrible glee that comes when a group of people have been through hell together on zero sleep and all social norms have dissolved. Bryan was hiding his face in his forearm, his shoulders shaking. An older gentleman who looked like he should be reciting Persian poetry had to fold over, hands on knees. It went on forever, until they gaspingly managed to pull it together. The pregnant doctor rubbed the side of her bump with a wince. Bryan’s face was red. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Okay,’ he said. His voice trembled up into the remnants of a giggle before he got himself back under control. He turned to the pregnant doctor. ‘Houma, how are we looking in pediatrics?’

Nate could now recognise this as normality; a regular morning briefing. He dragged his eyes away from Bryan and looked at Mike, who shook his head with a smile.

‘These doctors are sick fucks,’ he said, half-rueful and half-approving. They _were_ sick fucks. They were also highly organised. They checked in, department by department. Bryan scrawled some stuff on the board that could have said anything at all, but all the doctors nodded sagely. Then they scattered, moving with purpose.

Coming out of the office, Bryan paused next to Nate and Mike. Nate braced himself for another few rounds with the guy, but Bryan just smiled. ‘It’s okay, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘We’re not really going to let the babies die.’ He slapped Nate on the shoulder reassuringly, looking more cheerful than Nate felt.

‘That’s great,’ he said, not knowing how else to respond. Then he launched into his pitch. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘and it’s clear to me that there’s a need for a clinic in the city.’ Bryan was already moving briskly to a shelving unit and stuffing his pockets full of gauze and ampoules and other mysterious items. ‘But not here.’ Bryan patted a pocket, and then his chest. He found a pen, which he tucked behind his ear. He kept moving, making Nate trail him like an obnoxious younger sibling. Nate wasn’t used to having people walk away from him. ‘We could help you find a better location. A safer location. Somewhere out of the slums.’

Bryan stopped and looked at Nate. _Fantastic,_ thought Nate, with optimism that turned out, once again, to be misplaced.

‘Who do you think goes to free clinics?’ he asked.

‘Do we have to use the Socratic method?’ Nate said with a sigh. ‘Poor people. Yes, I know. Area of greatest need.’

‘Glad you agree.’ Bryan retied his bandana and fixed Nate with a glare. ‘Are we done with your prepared remarks? I’ve got two hours of general clinic then I’m operating all afternoon. And we’re out of fucking coffee.’

‘I’m done,’ said Nate grimly. ‘But I’m coming back. Your people deserve—’

‘Don’t fucking tell me what my people do or don’t deserve,’ Bryan said, and he pushed past Nate and stalked away down the hall.

‘Stop aggravating him.’ The pregnant doctor was standing a few feet away, pen and chart in hand. Her voice was very soft, and she spoke in a precise Iraqi accent with almost-British vowels. Like she learned English from watching the BBC. ‘You can’t begin to understand the pressure he’s under.’

‘I think I can,’ Nate told her. A look of terrible sorrow crossed her face, although she said nothing and her posture didn’t change. Abruptly Nate realised that her white coat had, stitched in navy blue, the legend BAGHDAD UNIVERSITY TEACHING HOSPITAL, and her name—Dr Houma Bilal—in Latin and Arabic script. He shut his mouth.

‘Please go back to your soldiers,’ she said very politely. She and Nate stood for a long moment holding each other’s gaze. Nate was sweating and unwashed in his gear, and carrying a gun; he felt like an intruder. He wanted very much to lean his SAW against the wall and take off his Kevlar and flak vest, and introduce himself properly. Tell her that he had studied Classics and read Arabic poetry, and was not in fact a grotesque caricature of an invader but in fact a man of learning and, he hoped, of principle.

But any day now, Dr Bilal was going to give birth in the bombed-out ruin of her city. And she was asking him to leave, not telling. Asking. He vacillated. Mike stood motionless at his right elbow, letting him handle the situation, which he was doing badly.

‘It’s bad enough,’ said Dr Bilal with sudden fervour, ‘that we must accept help from outsiders. It’s worse when you’re here too. At least Dr Bryan has some respect. Go away, Lieutenant, and please do something about the other men with guns, instead of the men and women with bandages and sutures.’

‘Nate,’ Mike murmured. ‘Let’s move.’

They left, and left her standing there.

‘I just want to leave the place better than when we came here,’ said Nate to Mike on the way back to their base. In the back of the truck, the boys were butchering Tupac. Nate wasn’t going to be overheard.

‘Ours not to reason why, Nate,’ quoted Mike. It was hollow and they both knew it.

‘Any reasoning person,’ Nate began. He didn’t bother finishing the sentence, because although Mike agreed with him about a lot of things, there were criticisms that he couldn’t reasonably be expected to listen to from his commanding officer. There was a line that couldn’t be crossed.

‘What are we doing here, Nate?’ Mike said quietly an hour or so later, as they watched Bravo pair off into whatever houses were still standing.

‘Generating intelligence,’ said Nate. Actually making air quotes with his hands was bad form for an officer, so he tried to telegraph them into Mike’s brain through tone alone. By Mike’s immediate snort, he got the message. ‘We’re to clear the houses in this area of the city, ensuring that there are no enemy holdouts.’ He heard himself biting off the words in irritation. He would rather have still been at the hospital, trying to figure out a way of getting some sense into Dr Bryan.

‘What’s stopping ‘em coming back tomorrow?’ Mike asked.

‘Absolutely fucking nothing, Mike,’ Nate replied. ‘But it’s hoped that we might be able to round up some stragglers, and Meesh can go through any suspicious written material.’

Mike didn’t bother to reply, because the holes in the plan were blatantly so large that the plan was more hole than not. And Nate had no way of protesting the stupidity of it, so there they were. From where they were standing, leaning against the humvee with Garza up on the gun, Nate could see two walls collapsed into the street that they could clear away. He could see hanging power lines coming within a finger’s touch of the children playing in the street that they could remove. A factory building with windows that would be perfect for sniper fire, and whose front courtyard indicated the recent presence of a large number of people moving heavy objects and not cleaning up after themselves; all solid indicators that they should in fact be sweeping that building and not the homes of random civilians.

Meesh came slouching up with a young man. Meesh was gesticulating and snapping, and Nate sighed internally, not for the first time today. It was fine; at least nobody was getting shot at. He could handle Meesh.

‘What is it, Meesh?’

‘This dude says he knows some other dudes who might know some shit,’ said Meesh.

‘Can you be more specific?’ Nate asked.

Meesh shrugged, and rattled something off to the young man. The man replied, pointing to a couple of houses.

‘Great,’ said Nate quietly to Mike, pulling him out of Meesh’s earshot. ‘Let’s raid the houses of some people who this guy might possibly know to be bad guys, or might just really dislike.’

‘One of ‘em slept with his wife,’ suggested Mike.

‘Right.’ Nate sighed and turned back to Meesh. ‘Does he have any kind of evidence?’

Meesh shrugged. ‘I don’t know, man. What is he, a lawyer?’

‘You tell me, Meesh.’

Meesh exchanged words with the guy. ‘Dude says he used to run a store, until we bombed it. But he’s happy we bombed it, because the Americans—’

‘Yeah, no,’ said Nate. ‘We’re not going after some random locals because a shopkeeper thinks they might somehow be involved with the Republican Guard. Tell him no.’

‘You wanted the locals to cooperate, now you don’t want them to cooperate,’ grumbled Meesh, but he translated anyway.

‘How’s the list?’ Mike asked as Meesh wandered off with his new friend. Nate fished his notebook out of his pocket and opened it so that Mike could see. Mike whistled.

‘Yeah. Water, power, sanitation, theft, violence. People are very forthcoming about what needs to be fixed.’

‘Medical care is pretty high on the list,’ said Nate.

‘We could do something about that,’ said Mike. Nate had known Mike long enough by now to be able to identify the suggestion in his voice.

‘It’s not our job,’ said Nate. That was the party line and he was sticking to it, at least as far as possible. He had bent rules, lately. Pushed back when he should obey. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t see better options. He didn’t like saying no to Mike, either, especially when there was a viable ethical reason to say yes.

But the Corps didn’t run on ethics, and Nate had no right to fling a spanner into the works because he didn’t always like how the machine was operated.

‘Okay,’ said Mike, still neutral.

Later, they sat together against a wall at their current base of operations, drinking bad coffee and sharing the contents of an MRE. Mike elbowed Nate in the ribs until he looked over.

‘Something I said?’ Nate asked.

‘Nate,’ Mike said to him seriously. ‘What are you gonna do after this?’

‘Take a vacation. See my family.’

‘After the Corps.’

‘I haven’t decided,’ said Nate, which was very close to being true. Mike’s dependable, craggy face rearranged itself into a hangdog sort of attitude.

‘Not like you to be operating without a plan.’

‘Let’s just say I don’t yet have a clear picture of the AO,’ Nate told him. He tore open a pouch of PopTarts and shook one out into his hand, then handed Mike the other.

‘You could do anything you wanted,’ said Mike through a mouthful. Nate’s heart lifted in his chest, in the dumb way it always did when Mike approved of him. If this was what command was always like—him and Mike, with a clear understanding of what needed to be done—Nate wouldn’t be idly wondering what it might be like to teach history to undergrads, or advise politicians about the Middle East, or instruct recruits in strategy. Or any of the other many daydreams about second lives, lives after this one.

‘Thanks, Mike,’ said Nate, keeping the other stuff locked away.

‘I call ‘em how I see ‘em.’ He finished his coffee and tipped the dregs out onto the floor. ‘But you want my advice?’

‘Always.’

‘Don’t fucking drift along. Figure out what you want and go for it.’

‘Any advice on how you figure it out?’

Mike laughed. ‘I enlisted when I was seventeen. Never wanted to do anything else.’

‘When I perfect my time machine, Mike, I’ll let you know.’ Nate said it very gravely, because it always made Mike laugh. They pulled themselves up off the floor, feeling the bone-deep exhaustion and pushing through it. If the rumour mill was functioning correctly, and it somehow always was, they’d be moving on in two days. Plenty to do.

And while Nate usually liked to sit around and shoot the shit with Mike, he had the uncomfortable feeling that Mike was on the edge of a conversation Nate desperately didn’t want to have. Almost asking about things that Nate wouldn’t— _couldn’t_ —tell him about.

 

* * *

 

‘Rudy,’ said Nate, cornering the guy by a humvee and accidentally standing a little too close. He dropped his voice. ‘Help me out.’ The look on Rudy’s face said, clearly, _I always knew this day would come_.

‘Sir,’ he said blandly.

‘Coffee,’ Nate rushed out, before he can be accused of an abuse of power. ‘I need to know how you make it.’

‘Hot water and coffee granules, sir.’

‘Let me be more specific. I need to know how you make it _well_.’

‘Any reason, sir?’ Rudy asked, but he was already rummaging for his espresso maker and setting up shop.

‘Trying to be a better person,’ Nate said dryly. Rudy cocked his head like he was posing for a photo. ‘Hospital down the road’s out of coffee.’

‘You’re taking the doctor coffee? That’s good karma,’ said Rudy, slowly heating water. He swirled it with hypnotic grace. Not for the first time, Nate wondered what it might be like to go through life in Rudy’s body.

‘Not really. I’m hoping bribery will get their guy out of there.’

‘Not to question your tactics, sir, but I think anyone saving lives in Baghdad right now might need something better than coffee to sway him.’

‘If you’ve got something better, I want to know about it.’

‘I don’t,’ said Rudy, ‘but maybe you’ve just got to work your personal connection with the guy.’

‘We don’t have a personal connection. He’d like me to disappear and never come back.’ Nate snorted, quietly. ‘He’s stubborn.’

‘He’s righteous,’ said Rudy beatifically. ‘He’s a warrior healer, man.’

‘He’s a pain in my ass,’ said Nate.

‘Love and hate are the closest emotions, sir,’ said Rudy, so earnestly that Nate couldn’t be annoyed. It wasn’t as if Rudy knew anything. That was just how he was.

‘That’ll do, Rudy,’ Nate told him.

‘Yessir.’ Rudy filled the canteen, screwed the lid down tight and handed it over. Nate eased it down into one of his leg pockets, hoisted his SAW into his elbow, and climbed into his humvee.

‘Let’s go,’ he told Mike, before he lost his nerve. Mike parked outside, so close to the wall that Nate could barely squeeze out. Immediately Mike set himself up so he was covering the vehicle. Feeling exposed, Nate stripped off his vest and left his gun with Mike, who gave him a long, baleful look.

‘This is a dumbass idea, Nate,’ he said bluntly.

‘I know,’ Nate said. ‘I know. Look, I won’t be long.’

‘Define that.’

‘An hour. Maybe two. You could link up with Hitman Three. I’ll—I can make my way there. It’s fine.’

‘And lie for you, Nate?’

Nate couldn’t say anything for a moment. Mike had him exactly pinned down in this skirmish. But Mike had driven him over here, peeling off from the other victors early, knowing Nate’s intentions. So Nate owed it to him to say, ‘Not if you can’t, Mike. I wouldn’t ask you to put your career at risk.’

‘Shit,’ said Mike eventually, ‘I already have. Wouldn’t be the first time.’ He stared at his big paws on the wheel, flexed his fingers up and down. ‘I’ll wait. If anyone asks, I’ll tell ‘em you’re tied up with orders from battalion.’

‘Thanks,’ Nate said, knowing it was inadequate. What was worse was that he didn’t care. How he was treating Mike right now was a dull ache. Not being with Bryan was a knife under the ribs. As Mike settled into his seat watchfully, Nate patted the coffee in his pocket. The warmth of it was making him sweat even more than usual.

He went looking for Dr Bryan, ghosting along corridors and peeping into operating theatre windows. He wasn’t anywhere. Nate didn’t ask anyone. _If it’s meant to be, I’ll find him,_ he told himself, in an absurd fit of Rudyesque sentimentality.

Nate finally found him in a deserted hallway. A blown-out window let the afternoon light flood in, golden and dynamic with dust motes. Up here, it was almost quiet. Nate didn’t really hear the gunfire any more when it was off in the distance. The doctor was sitting on the floor at the end of the corridor. His back was against the wall and he had one leg stretched out and the other acting as a prop for his forearm. His face was buried in his elbow. One surgical glove was crumpled on the floor between his feet; the other was still on his left hand. The whole of his body was collapsed in on itself, sagging under its own muscular weight. Nate walked down the hall, stepping around the abandoned IV stands and chairs and detritus. His boots crunched on some loose tiles that had fallen off the wall. At first, Nate thought the doctor was crying. Then, as he approached, he heard the steady sound of snoring and realised that Bryan was asleep.

Nate came in close, stepping around Bryan’s outstretched leg and crouching down. He wondered how long the man had been asleep for and suddenly questioned his decision to be here at all. He knew intimately the pain of closing one’s eyes for twenty minutes only to be jerked back to wakefulness by some emergency, somehow feeling worse than before. He set the canteen down on the floor and looked at Bryan’s face. His mouth was open and the pale green cloth of his scrubs was dark with drool where it stretched over his knee. He didn’t look like nearly as much of an asshole when he wasn’t frowning at Nate. To his horror, Nate realised he was smiling indulgently. He wiped the smile off his face and reached out to touch Bryan’s shoulder.

‘What have we got?’ Bryan said immediately, his head snapping up. The rasp of his voice was sawdusty and dry. His eyes focused on Nate. ‘Christ, what do you want?’

‘I brought coffee,’ Nate said weakly, sliding the canteen across the floor tiles with a squeak. Bryan snatched it and unscrewed the lid, sniffing. ‘And baby wipes.’ He pulled the package out of his pocket and proffered it.

‘If this is bribery,’ Bryan said, ‘know that I’m going to drink your coffee and do whatever the fuck I want anyway.’

‘Okay,’ said Nate. He sat down with a groan. He was tired too, and sore from sleeping on the ground. Bryan eyed him like a feral dog as he sipped the coffee. It had to have been burning his mouth. He still had one glove on. ‘You’ve still got a glove on,’ he informed Bryan. Bryan looked at it as if he’d never seen it before, then pulled it off. He looked at his watch.

‘Ninety minutes,’ he said. ‘Not bad. Most I’ve had in a while. The trick is hiding so my staff can’t find me.’

‘I managed three hours last night,’ said Nate. He knew he sounded smug. He doubled down and smiled, too.

‘Oh, fuck you,’ Bryan said. ‘We work around the clock.’

Nate shuffled his ass backwards so that he could lean against the wall. They sat at right angles, feet in the sunbeam. Somewhere outside, a little bird was singing its heart out in a sweet high cheep.

‘So did we, until this week,’ Nate said.

‘City’s falling apart and you guys are working _less_?’ Bryan said. He pulled open the tab on the baby wipes and started to clean his face, starting at the edge of his bandana and systematically working down.

‘Don’t get me started,’ Nate said grimly. ‘I might never stop.’

‘Yeah, I get that impression.’ Bryan crumpled the baby wipe and grabbed a second one for his hands. He got down the side of his fingernails and underneath them. A little furrow appeared between his straight, dark brows. Nate looked at Bryan’s raw, cracking knuckles and tried to imagine what it would be like to spray them down with alcohol several times a day. Without looking up, Bryan said, ‘you lost the gun, then.’

Nate shrugged. ‘I know when I’m beaten, doctor.’

‘We’re still not gonna leave.’

‘Yeah,’ Nate said. ‘I kinda thought you might put me to work.’

Bryan looked up slowly, his eyebrows coming up too. His eyes flickered over Nate’s face. Were they hazel or brown? Brown, Nate decided. Nate hoped he looked calm and competent instead of bizarrely nervous. ‘Did Daddy sign your permission slip?’ Bryan asked eventually.

‘I’m not exactly AWOL, if that’s what you’re saying,’ Nate said. Did Bryan look disappointed? It was hard to tell. He had a better poker face than Nate.

‘I can find you something to do.’ Bryan stood up and laced his fingers together, stretching and cracking his shoulders.

‘This is killing me,’ Nate said. He stood up too. ‘The uselessness.’ The golden light was everywhere now; the sun had moved around and everything was glowing. Bryan was looking at Nate like he really saw him. It was too much, and Nate leaned down to pick up the canteen rather than face the intensity of Bryan’s gaze. ‘I thought I’d be doing something real out here, you know, actually helping people.’

‘What the fuck gave you that idea?’

Nate shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’ He immediately wanted to shove the words back into his mouth.

It was a relief when they started moving. They walked down the hall and took the stairs down to triage, their boots kicking up dust and making a weird metallic echoing sound on the concrete. On the main level, Bryan took Nate by the back of the arm and steered him efficiently to a desk.

‘Mohit,’ Bryan said to a compact guy with an incredible moustache that curled at the ends. He reminded Nate irresistibly of an Indian Franz Ferdinand. ‘This is Nate. Find him some orderly work to do.’ Mohit looked at Nate over his clipboard, weighing and measuring him. ‘Mohit runs logistics,’ Bryan said. ‘Have fun.’ He leaned in to say it, audibly amused.

_Wait,_ Nate wanted to say, adrift. He could feel the ghost of Bryan’s grip on his arm. He wanted Bryan to come back; he had thought, naively, that he could help Bryan. But a crash course in battlefield trauma probably wasn’t all that impressive in a hospital full of qualified medical professionals.

‘Any back problems?’ Mohit asked. Nate shook his head. ‘How are you with blood?’

‘Fine,’ Nate said, because he was.

‘Great. You’re on stretcher duty, my friend. Welcome.’

‘Thanks,’ said Nate. He found he actually meant it. Mohit directed him to a little bay in a corridor, where half a dozen wiry local men stood around and shot the shit in a way that needed no translation. Frequently, someone called for them in English or French or Arabic or Kurdish, and two of them picked up a stretcher from the stack against the wall and ferried someone around. Incredibly, Bryan was not fucking with him. For the next couple of hours, Nate revelled in the feeling of doing something productive and uncomplicated.

He didn’t think about his platoon, or about Mike. He didn’t even really think about Dr Bryan. He just worked, and the work was good. It was only later, when he was climbing back into the humvee under Mike’s gaze, that he realised what he had done.

‘Get what you needed? You okay?’ Mike asked.

Without considering what Mike might mean by that, Nate smiled.

‘Yeah,’ he said. 'I'm fine.' Mike turned the engine over and they made their way to where they should have been nearly three hours ago. Nate wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or appalled that nobody bothered to ask where they’d been.

 

* * *

 

Two days of insanity. Nate barely slept. It was like being under fire again, crawling along the MSR with arty lighting up the sky. Except worse, because it was scattered groups of random men acting with no apparent leadership or goals. Nate and his platoon responded to calls like they were cops, dashing from pillar to post to suppress fire, or break up a riot, or blockade a road. The city was febrile with rage and grief. Kids were as likely now to fling rocks at their humvees as to run alongside them waving. Women ducked inside their houses when they saw armed men coming.

Each morning, Nate stood patiently and listened to his orders at Godfather’s briefing. And each morning he gritted his teeth until his ears rang, and tried with all his willpower not to open his mouth and scream. Or worse, say something that contradicted the infallible orders of the battalion.

‘Gentlemen,’ rasped Ferrando one morning. ‘Godfather knows you’ve all been waiting for a chance to get back into the game. I’ve just been speaking with General Mattis, and the good news is we have the opportunity to do just that. In the next forty-eight hours, the Air Force will be raining down some hell on Saddam City. We’ve received reports of ongoing jihadist activity in the area, and we’re going to stamp it out. Once the smoke’s cleared, First Recon will be pushing through the area clearing it street by street. We will leave no stone unturned in our ongoing liberation of Baghdad.’

Around Nate, Sixta and Schwetje were nodding as if any of this made sense. Nate’s tongue almost itched with the desire to say something. But he had very little capital left, if he’d ever had any, and nothing he said would make a difference. Then, behind him, Patterson spoke up.

‘Sir, Saddam City _is_ still a residential area. Are there plans to relocate civilians?’

‘Civilians have been leaving Baghdad for days,’ Ferrando said, which didn’t answer the question. ‘Our intelligence suggests that sector of the city is now to be considered a Republican Guard stronghold.’ Nate wondered what kind of intelligence they’d been able to gather; what would possibly justify the airstrike. Ferrando gestured to Schwetje. ‘Captain Schwetje has been patrolling the outskirts of Saddam City with the interpreter. It’s his decisive reporting that’s opened up the opportunity for this mission.’

Schwetje’s lumpish face broke into a shy sort of smile, delighted by the praise. Nate wished he hadn’t wondered.

‘And the aid station, sir?’ Nate could have turned around and kissed Patterson.

‘Lieutenant Fick is working on that,’ said Ferrando.

‘Doing my best, sir,’ said Nate, ‘but—’

‘But’s not a word Godfather likes to hear, Fick. I don’t hear it from Schwetje. Move those civilians along _today_. That’s an order.’

Ferrando’s face had settled into a grimmer sort of aspect, and he was glaring intently at Nate for about the sixth time in the past week. The buck had been passed; as far as anyone in the briefing knew, it was Nate’s incompetence that had lead directly to the ongoing existence of a tiresome aid agency outpost in the exact place that Ferrando wanted to level. And there was nothing Nate could say or do about it.

The briefing broke up. Nate swerved Schwetje and his little rodent pet Griego, falling into step with Patterson.

‘Thanks,’ Nate said under his voice. ‘For trying.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Patterson, world-wearied as always. ‘Just get those civilians well clear, Nate.’

In a different timeline, Nate would have liked to know Patterson better. But lately he wasn’t getting any of what he wanted.

 

* * *

 

‘He’s being irresponsible,’ Nate said.

Once again, he had drawn the short straw. An increasingly quantity of shit was rolling downhill; Mattis was now aware of the hospital and wanted it disappeared. Amongst the talk of the bombing run over the slums, of the jihadists too embedded to easily be rooted out, Patterson’s caution about civilians had finally gained a little traction. Not for the first time, Nate thought unflattering thoughts about Mattis, about Godfather, about the philosophy of this particular war and about Meesh who, even if he had been cloned to give every patrol an interpreter, would still doubtless manage to be inadequate. He ran his hand over his hair, thinking as he did so that he needed to buzz it back down. Refocused. This was about Bryan, and the hospital. ‘He’s jeopardising lives.’

‘He’s saving lives,’ said Houma. ‘The agency goes where it’s needed, and it’s needed here.’

‘You’re not telling me that they deliberately send doctors directly into warzones and tells them to set up shop somewhere like _this_.’

‘There is some leeway. He likes to use it, I think.’

‘As I said,’ Nate continued, ‘irresponsible.’

‘You’re not helping, you know.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re not helping. You think the solution is to evacuate us under armed escort. That’s very dangerous for us.’

‘You’d be safe under escort,’ Nate protests.

‘Stop thinking like a soldier. Look at the bigger picture. There are hospitals like this in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia and Congo and Sudan. People have televisions and the internet now. It’s a global world. When the military starts interfering, we’re associated with you. With America. Anyone with a grudge against the United States thinks they can make a big impression by killing us.’

‘But you’re doctors,’ said Nate, appalled. ‘And you’re from Baghdad.’

‘Dr Bryan’s agency lost two nurses in Morocco last year. Morocco! That was a safe place.’

‘I’m sorry. Did he know them?’

‘He doesn’t have to know them to care.’

‘All I see is a man who’s going to let it happen again here. I don’t fucking—excuse me—I don’t care how much he cares.’

Houma looked away and then down at the floor, blinking hard. ‘So he didn’t tell you about Afghanistan.’

‘No,’ said Nate slowly.

Houma sighed. ‘I’m not going to be the person to tell his secrets. Anyway, I just know that the military got involved and it didn’t end well.’

‘He feels responsible?’

‘It’s not my story to tell.’

It didn’t really matter that he didn’t have the full story anyway. Nate could understand. Understand, at least, that Bryan had his people just like Nate had his. Bryan would make whatever decisions he thought necessary. It was too bad that those decisions were fucking stupid, Nate thought. He wondered, as Houma got back to work. If he were Bryan, what kind of appeal to reason would work? How would someone get through to him?

He turned the problem over in his mind and examined it from all angles. One of the local staff came by with a jug of mango juice and a glass, pouring out half a glassful for anyone who wanted it. Nate accepted, trying not to be squeamish about sharing the glass. He wondered where the hell it came from. It was good, and surprisingly cold, and as he drank it his stomach rumbled and he remembered that he’d been hungry for weeks. Afterwards, he pressed his cold hand to his face, and made his move.

Bryan was once again in pediatrics, holding a little girl in a pink dress on his hip with one hand, while he inspected another girl with a badly-burned leg. He gestured and said something to a nurse, and they both looked at the leg again and nodded. As the nurse went in with a swab, the girl with the burn started to cry and set her sister off too. Bryan turned and walked up the ward, removing them from the situation.

‘It’s okay, baby,’ Bryan said, gently stroking the girl’s hair. ‘It’s okay.’ She buried her face in his shoulder and he bounced her automatically, soothingly, even as he moved on to the next station. Her little fists were balled into his scrub top. She seemed uninjured but her feet were covered in mud and she was thin. Looking at her feet, Nate remembered a woman he saw scooping dirty water out of a drain in a bucket. Bryan carried the girl not as though she were unwashed but as though she were precious cargo. Nate stayed very still by the door, because if he moved then Bryan might notice him. He would have liked to put off the conversation he was about to force Bryan into. He would have liked to stand here all day and watch Bryan in his natural habit.

The nurse was bandaging the other girl’s leg, and then she offered something; a candy, bright red. A smile appeared. The nurse smiled back. Bryan took a look over his shoulder and walked the girl back to his sister. ‘Let’s go, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Let’s see your sister, huh?’ The girl had stopped crying, because as far as Nate could tell, Dr Bryan had magical powers. He wondered if tears might work on Bryan where logic and strategy failed. He suspected he wasn’t young or cute enough to pull it off.

Nate was almost smiling at the thought, when Bryan caught sight of him and came over, immediately tense with irritation.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Nate said. ‘Alone.’

‘And I was hoping for coffee,’ said Bryan. It came out flat and without levity. Clearly, today was not Nate’s day.

‘Sorry to disappoint.’ They turned the corner into an empty room that might once have been a nurses’ station.

‘Out with it, then,’ said Bryan, rolling his wrists and thumbs. Nate noticed the grime running along the creases between Bryan’s neck and shoulder. Poor guy probably wasn’t getting any more wash water than Nate was, with the exception of scrubbing in for surgery. And here Nate was about to ruin his day even harder.

‘What happened in Afghanistan?’ Nate asked. Bryan’s shoulders tensed and his hands momentarily stopped moving.

‘Don’t you have anything better to do than show up here and gossip?’

‘It’s relevant intelligence,’ Nate said crisply. He drew around himself the same sense of assurance as he would when ordering his men into a dangerous mission.

‘It’s irrelevant to you, because you’re leaving,’ Bryan said. His hands were still touching, making Nate all too aware of the bulk of his shoulders. So the guy hadn’t gone through BRC: Nate was willing to bet that he could probably still throw a punch. And it wasn’t as though Nate could fight back without looking like a real asshole.

‘I’m not leaving,’ said Nate. ‘This is—either I need to move you and your staff somewhere safer, or I need a reason why that _isn’t_ happening that will satisfy Command.’

‘Sounds like a you problem, Lieutenant.’

‘It’s going to be more than a me problem soon,’ Nate told him. ‘Because battalion is calling in a bombing run in this area of the city.’ He gritted his teeth, waiting for the explosion. But when Bryan spoke, his voice was very quiet.

‘You motherfuckers,’ he said. ‘It’s not enough that you rip through this country slaughtering civilians and razing their homes. That you displace people from the city. It’s not even enough to waste the time of me and my staff by trying to throw your weight around. You’re gonna leave these people with a nice little parting gift of whatever ordnance you have left over.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘I guess it saves you money on fuel costs.’

‘That’s not it at all,’ said Nate, but he didn’t know what _it_ was. It was too dishonest to try to argue Godfather’s logic—the terrorists, the bad guys, the jihadists, supposedly hiding out and supposedly worth the monstrous collateral damage.

‘I break the rules, people die,’ said Bryan, almost absently. He was massaging the ball of his right thumb with his left hand. ‘I follow the rules, people die.’

‘That’s war,’ said Nate.

‘It’s not my fucking war. Or any of the people who show up at the hospital.’

‘I don’t have an answer for you.’ Some of Nate’s exhaustion must have come through in his voice, because Bryan looked at him for a long moment, right into his face, and then nodded. He didn’t reply, and the minutes stretched out. Somewhere nearby there was an explosion, probably a controlled detonation. Nate felt it through his feet as much as heard it, and a little trickle of plaster dust fell from the ceiling.

Eventually, Bryan spoke.

‘We were in Bamiyan, running a vaccination clinic,’ he said. ‘Not a warzone. Mostly quiet. US Army rolled in, some locals got riled up and there was a riot. Twenty four, thirty six hours, just went on and on.’ He was looking past Nate now, his eyes moving back and forth as if he was watching a movie. ‘I had one other doctor and four nurses with me. Three women. We had this, uh, influx of female casualties.’

He paused, still looking past Nate. Nate waited, because there was some kind of hideous spell on Bryan and to break it would be, perhaps, to break the man. Nate had seen it before. A compulsive retelling of an horrific event, which had to be endured for the sake of the teller.

Between the lines, Nate could read the word _rape_. So when Bryan continued, Nate didn’t have to ask him to explain anything.

‘Some folks got it into their heads that we were conspiring with the army to rape their women. Captain came by, told us there might be trouble. Offered to garrison his men next door to the clinic. I couldn’t stop thinking about the women we had with us. If I’d been smarter, I’d have known not to prioritise gossip over the agency’s procedures. Hadn’t slept in days, so everything felt like life or death. I made the call and the Captain brought in his guys.’ Bryan looked through at his dry, cracked hands. ‘When the rioting finally got to us, they came out in force. Brought everything they had to throw at the Army, and pinned them down in the apartment building. We had to bail out the back door as fast as we can, and Mélanie got caught in the crossfire. She didn't make it to the Jeeps.’

Bryan stopped. The last sentence ghosted out. He was still looking at the floor, but he let out a long, shaky breath.

‘Was it bad?’ Nate asked very quietly. Intuitively there was always a difference between a bad death and a clean kill.

‘Shot in the throat,’ Bryan said, touching his clavicle with two fingers. ‘Drowned in her own blood. And God knows how many patients we left behind to die.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Nate, convinced of it. ‘You’re a civilian. You’re not trained for this.’

‘It was my goddamn fault,’ Bryan snapped. ‘And we are trained for it. It’s rule number one, top of the fucking list: don’t jump into bed with the military, however scared you get. Impartiality keeps us alive more often than it kills us. That’s a fact. I chose to ignore that and other people paid the price.’

Nate refrained from pointing out the obvious: that the Captain should never have acted on hearsay; that an apartment building was a useless place to try to use as a base of operations; that Marines would have busted out of the building and protected the clinic; that Marines would never have backed themselves into a corner like that at all. Instead, he owned it. Which he should have done from day one.

‘I’m giving you something better than hearsay,’ he said. ‘One hundred percent, if you stay here you’ll be in danger from USAF airstrikes. I can’t tell you exactly where they’ll land, because even our battalion commander hasn’t got a fucking clue. And we’re pulling out soon so we don’t accidentally kill our own men—which is an improvement on our strategy to date, by the way.’

In front of him, Bryan visibly put himself back together.

‘When?’

‘Twenty-four hours, give or take,’ said Nate. ‘If you pull back to the Shorja, the big market building, you should be well clear.’

‘I know it.’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,’ Nate told him. He sucked in a breath. ‘It’s not like I can say this to many other people, but this whole invasion has been a clusterfuck, so there it is.’

Bryan gave a dry, exhausted laugh. He passed a hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. They looked painfully red.

‘No kidding.’

 

* * *

 

On the last day, which Nate had been trying very hard not to think about—the last day in Baghdad, the last day in close proximity to Dr Bryan—Nate went to the hospital. He went with just Mike, because the school where they were garrisoned was so hectic with activity that nobody would notice them gone. He went because he needed to check that Bryan wasn’t going to let his principles get in the way. No; he went because he wanted to see the guy before he left, plain and simple. With Mike waiting in the humvee, with once again hand resting on his SAW and a clear view down the street, Nate shucked his body armour and walked unarmed into the crumbling hospital building.

He felt reckless. No longer did he get the cautionary prickle between his shoulder blades when he took off his Kevlar. Let the snipers glass him. The concept of someone punishing him for this seemed very far away. Last night, he had lay awake and flushed in the dark, thinking that even a court martial would endear him to Dr Bryan rather than condemn him. Surely he would be able to take the fall for Mike.

If anyone in the platoon had offered him that kind of logic, he’d have been concerned about combat stress and effectiveness. He knew that, from a very long way away. He ignored it.

By now, he didn’t have to ask someone to point him towards Bryan. Apparently everyone knew him well enough by sight to immediately give him directions.

In the supply closet, Bryan was packing a box. His usual scrub top was gone and he was wearing a fitted grey t-shirt with MEDIC across his back in red. Time, abrasion or laundry had removed the lower half of the C, and the left shoulder seam was coming unstitched. Nate eyed the patch of golden skin visible through the hole and his hand ached to reach out and run his finger over it.

‘They said you’d be here,’ said Nate. Bryan turned around and nodded at him.

‘I’m not safe to operate,’ he said. The dark circles under his eyes confirmed that.

‘You should sleep.’ Nate tried not to say it in the same way he’d tell Brad or Mike to get some rest, but it came out that way anyway.

‘Things to do,’ Bryan told him. He stood up and grabbed an armful of white boxes from the shelf, tipping them into the box. Nate leaned against the door jamb and watched him. The temptation was to help, but he knew he’d only be in the way. Down the hall, a very young child screamed endlessly, wailing on and on in pain.

‘How do you do it?’ Nate asked eventually.

‘Surgical residencies pretty much cure you of the need to sleep,’ Bryan said.

‘I meant—’

‘I know what you meant.’ He dipped into the bottom of the box, rearranging. ‘You just do it,’ he said to the room in general. ‘You train and you get on with it, and you deal with the crap later.’

Nate tried the question in a different way. ‘How do you—how did you—train for this?’

‘Trauma residency in Jozi,’ said Bryan absently. His lips moved, counting. Nate let him finish.

‘Jozi?’

‘Johannesburg.’

‘Right.’ Nate felt like a dumb American, inexplicably, because Bryan was also American.

Bryan sorted and counted, sorted and counted. There was so much more Nate wanted to ask him. There was so much more he wanted to hear Bryan say.

‘How are those kids handling it, anyway,’ Bryan asked. Nate was just about to ask which kids, when Bryan fixed him with a look and raised his eyebrows.

‘They’re not children,’ said Nate defensively. He stopped himself. ‘They’re just nineteen and dumb, yeah, I know, Bryan, they _don’t_ handle it.’

‘There you go,’ Bryan said, and that was the end of that. He grabbed another box. Some of the tape had folded over a flap, hanging it up. Bryan grabbed a box cutter and fixed it with two swift, surgical strokes.

‘Excellent work, doctor,’ said Nate, deadpanning and Bryan laughed. Nate hadn’t heard him really laugh before; he wanted to hear it again. It didn’t really seem like Bryan was in a laughing mood, though.

‘Why do you keep coming here, Lieutenant?’

‘I’m trying to do something good,’ Nate said, too quickly. It felt like a canned response, because it was, and Bryan rolled his eyes with an irritated head gesture that made a muscle in his neck flex. Nate wanted to put his mouth on it.

‘Yeah, I believe that in a general sense. But it wasn’t the question. Come on, man. You’re not planning a fucking career in medicine. So what is it?’

Nate had run across a bridge into oncoming fire, and he had survived officer training, and Captain fucking America, and he had watched a child die, and now, right now, he felt sick.

‘You,’ he said, and then he cleared his throat. ‘Fuck. Sorry. It’s what you’re doing here, obviously. It feels nobler than what I’m doing. Is that hokey to say? It’s true.’ He paused, hoping Bryan would throw him a lifeline in this nightmarish conversation. ‘No, it’s kind of true, and the rest is just you.’ Nate swiped his hand over his hair, even though there was nothing to arrange or rearrange. ‘Sorry,’ he said again.

Bryan swallowed and uncrossed his arms. His weight shifted, coming forward a little. For a heady moment, Nate thought that Bryan was going to come over to him. Instead, he curled his top lip up off his teeth, irritated, and folded his arms again. He cleared his throat.

‘I can’t respond to this,’ he said, sounding frayed, ‘in the way that I would like.’

‘Bad for business to break a metacarpal, I’d imagine,’ Nate said, trying for humour.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Bryan said, ‘but that wasn’t what I meant.’ Nate opened his mouth to reply and Bryan cut him off. ‘Look, it’s not good for me to get attached when I’m in the field. I lose focus.’

‘Dr Bryan,’ Nate began, but Bryan cut him off again.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘just call me Tim.’

Nate flushed hot and embarrassed up his neck and into his face. He couldn’t say it out loud. It felt absurdly intimate, quasi-sexual.

‘We could—’ Nate began, about to suggest they exchange phone numbers, or anything that might increase the chances of him seeing Dr Bryan—Tim—again.

‘You’re blushing,’ said Tim, observing him like a medical specimen. And yet, his voice was strained and his left hand moved almost of its own volition to push the door closed. Against all odds, Nate finally remembered what he had come to the hospital to say.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said, his voice coming out flat. ‘Early tomorrow morning. Pulling out to a nearby town.’

‘So this,’ said Tim, pointing back and forth between them, ‘is a time-limited offer.’ His eyes were on Nate’s mouth. Nate didn’t think he was conscious of it happening.

Nate closed the distance quickly, in case he changed his mind. And because the element of surprise was powerful, and Tim was visibly affected. He got his hands on Tim’s chest, almost expecting to be pushed away. Then everything happened very fast: his brain taking in the warmth and the tactile feeling of the guy’s chest under his hands, the sound of Tim’s inhale, and the tortuous, hovering moment before Tim’s hands came to rest on Nate’s upper arms.

‘Shouldn’t be doing this,’ Tim said to himself, and then he pulled Nate closer. One arm slid around Nate’s shoulders and the other was vice-like on his bicep.

‘God,’ Nate managed to say, breathing it out against Tim’s mouth in the terrible, aching second before Tim finally kissed him. Nate took in the solid bulk of Tim’s chest, the surprisingly strong lines of his sides. He slid his hands up to the back of Tim’s neck, thumbs along his jawline over the pulse. He pressed up against Tim, wanting as much body contact as possible.

And Tim was only in scrub pants and a t-shirt; Nate, bulky in all his layers of gear, wished that was all he was wearing, too. Thin material, so that he could feel all the hardness and softness of Tim’s body. The heat of him.

Their tongues slid together, feeling each other out. It was the best thing that had happened to Nate in weeks. It was unbearable. If he stopped, Nate would have to leave. If he kept going then time stopped and Nate could, potentially, stay in this storeroom forever with Tim, kissing him in secret like it was prom night.

Someone walked past the storeroom, shoes loud on the tiled floor. Nate and Tim sprang apart, both looking guiltily towards the door. Nate cleared his throat. He wanted to say something that would give meaning to the kiss—to everything.

Tim beat him to it.

‘Get out of here,’ he said, more casually than Nate could have managed. His lips were wet. Nate couldn’t stop looking at them. ‘I’ve got some shit to do before we can pull back.’

‘Stay safe,’ Nate told him, wanting to say much more. Tim just nodded gravely.

‘You too, Lieutenant.’

Nate walked out into the sunshine. The warmth hit his face and neck and, for the first time, he stopped in the middle of the courtyard and closed his eyes, tipping his face up into the light. He was hyper-aware of his lips, the hollow of his throat, his eyelids. The places on his body where Tim had touched him.

Weeks ago his latent anxiety had subsided, and then receded yet more into a dull kind of acceptance. On little sleep and little food, he hadn’t been able to sustain any kind of high emotion. They all did it; shut down those parts of themselves that were redundant or a liability in combat. Nate had been a dead man walking since Nasiriyah and probably before then.

Now he was waking up again, coming alive, his skin sparking with sensation in the sun. Thrilling with the knowledge that he could still exist a person who touched and kissed and wanted, and was wanted back.

Just in time to leave.

 

* * *

 

Kuwait, two weeks later. A lifetime later. Back at Mathilda, life coming full circle. Nate lay on his cot, eyes closed, trying for an hour of sleep. Outside, trucks trundled by and a few guys threw a baseball back and forth. The steady thwack of the ball into the glove should have sounding reassuring. Nate was too wired to sleep. He opened his eyes and watched the drab canvas ceiling, sweating through his t-shirt and into the cot. Three cots down, a Captain from an incoming platoon snored.

Over the next few days, Nate would be called upon to debrief thoroughly with incoming forces. Once the Corps had wrung everything they could from his exhausted brain, he would be allowed home. He wasn’t letting himself to think about home yet. There was no rule that said that Iraq couldn’t blow like a powder keg and send them all back across the border to handle it.

It might even be better, in a way. At least then he’d have a goal; a mission.

‘Hey, Nate.’ Mike came in, called him quietly. Nate sat upright immediately. ‘Your boy’s here, you know.’

Nate paused, trying to figure it out. ‘Brad?’ he asked stupidly. Mike laughed.

‘Come with me.’

Nate peeled himself off the mattress and shoved his feet into his boots. It still felt strange to take them off. Mike led him along the row of tents, cut back behind the mess tent, and fetched up by the long row of Portapotties in the appropriate desert sand colour. In the middle distance, by the wire, six Jeeps and a truck were lined up.

Nate ducked back behind the Portapotty at the end of the row before he could be spotted.

‘How long have they been here?’

‘Since early this morning,’ said Mike. ‘Apparently the Red Cross are moving in to set up something permanent. These guys are getting a civilian pickup at our airfield. Don’t ask me how it all works.’

‘I won’t,’ said Nate absently, taking a quick look back around the corner.

‘Well,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll get going. Let you talk to him.’

Nate knew that the look on his face was desperate; he knew how he’d been for weeks now. And if Mike could figure him out, then maybe other people could too.

‘Mike,’ he said, very low, grabbing Mike’s arm as he moved away. ‘Who else knows?’

Mike gave him a sympathetic, sideways look. ‘Just me, I figure,’ he said. ‘I’m not about to tell.’

‘Thanks.’

The dust kicked up in a cloud as Nate made his way across the no man’s land between toilets and wire. By the second Jeep, the doctor was cataloguing something and writing it down on a clipboard. Nate cracked a smile: inventory forms. He hovered for a moment, scoping out the situation. But there was nothing to scope out. It was just Tim and his forms, and a couple of people climbing about in the truck.

‘Stop creeping around, Lieutenant,’ said Tim when Nate was still crossing the dirt towards him. Nate jumped.

‘What the hell?’ he asked, walking over. ‘Are you psychic now?’

Tim looked at him. His face was a little dirty and he still looked tired, but some of the tightly-wound quality had clearly dissipated on the drive from Baghdad. He pointed at the side mirror of the Jeep. ‘I looked in the mirror,’ he admitted. ‘That’s, uh, situational awareness.’

‘Have you considered a career change?’

Tim snorted a laugh, and wrote something else on his clipboard. ‘How many forms would I have to fill out?’

‘So many,’ said Nate. ‘So, so many.’ He stood for a while and watched Tim work. Eventually, Tim heaved a sigh and threw the clipboard through the open window of the Jeep onto the passenger seat.

‘Thank God that’s over,’ he said. ‘We have to account for all this shit. Not that there’s much left.’

‘Where do you go now?’ Nate said.

‘Geneva, to debrief, and then home.’

‘Where’s home for you?’

‘Wisconsin.’

‘Huh,’ said Nate.

‘What, I don’t look like a country boy?’ In fact with his sensible boots and his shirt fitting a little tight across his shoulders, and a blue bandana keeping sweat off his face, Tim looked like he could be throwing hay around on a farm.

‘How long are you here?’ Nate asked. Wildly, he was running through a list of all the semi-private places in the camp. He knew he was looking hungrily at Tim’s face. He couldn’t help it.

‘Few hours,’ said Tim. ‘We fly out tonight.’

In the next few hours, Nate had a debriefing, an hour of potential leisure time, and then chow. If he thought too hard about what he could do with Tim in an hour, he’d be in serious danger of violating some rules. Instead, he opted for something even more stupid.

‘If you’re not sick of sun and sand,’ Nate said much too casually, ‘I’ll be in Oceanside for a while.’

‘I’ve been known to surf,’ said Tim blandly, and they looked at each other with a careful neutrality which Nate somehow managed to maintain although his heart was beating wildly in his chest.

Later, Mike gave him an appraising look and told him he looked slightly less like shit than usual.

‘Thanks, Mike,’ Nate said, almost cheerfully. A week until he got to go home, if nothing else went wrong. A week until Oceanside, and Tim. He could wait a week, now that he knew.

 

* * *

 

Tim never came.

Nate waited weeks; three weeks, to be exact. He left Tim’s name with battalion and with the front gate, so that if he called or showed up someone would let Nate know. And then he tried to exist like a normal person. He finished up his paperwork. He did some work briefing the next poor suckers who were flying out to Iraq. Submitted his vacation requests. Had a number of awkward impromptu interviews with battalion about _where he saw himself next_. Called his parents—yes, Mom, he’d be home soon. Drilled every morning with the rest of the guys, even though strictly speaking he didn’t have to. Probably didn’t eat enough.

He filled in the hours, but Tim never came.

At least, Nate thought pathetically, pining after some guy he’d met only a handful of times over the course of a week was stopping him from losing his mind over the bigger question: what the hell he wanted to be when he grew up.

‘Have you considered consulting?’ asked Felix, an old college friend. Nate leaned against the wall and mindlessly untangled the payphone cable with his free hand.

‘On what—getting shot at?’

‘Oh, you know. Security, policy. Something like that.’

Nate cast a look along the corridor and although it was empty, he dropped his voice. ‘I’m not on the market,’ he said.

‘Yeah, you are.’

‘You think I should start sending out resumes?’

‘I dunno, man. Kinda seems that way to me. Or go to law school.’

Nate laughed. Felix was a 3L right now, and their weekly conversations, he said, were the only thing keeping him sane.

‘Hard pass.’

‘Excellent strategy.’

‘Why are you trying to fix my life?’

‘Because it’s distracting me from my advocacy essay. Also because I grabbed a flyer from the law school lobby the other day and it made me think of you.’ There was a rustling of paper. ‘It’s here somewhere under like… twelve pounds of paper. Oh yeah: June twenty-six and twenty-seven, it’s a symposium. Collaborative Multi-Sector Strategies for Middle Eastern Stability in the New Millennium.’

‘That sounds,’ Nate began diplomatically, ‘interesting.’ It sounded boring. It also, he thought with amusement, sounded like the call for papers went out before they’d invaded Iraq.

‘It sounds amazingly boring, but the keynotes actually look pretty good. There’s a retired Colonel talking about rural internet access, and the President of some aid agency giving a presentation about cost-effective medical interventions. Nate, you love crap like this.’

Nate heart fluttered in his chest. He hadn’t thought about Tim all day, which was a record for him even though it was only five in the evening. He wasn’t even really thinking about him now; it was just an automatic physical reaction from somewhere deep in his nervous system. It was just one kiss. It didn’t mean anything, in the grand scheme of things.

‘I don’t know, man. What’s the point—I go there and network my way into a job at a DC think tank?’ As soon as he said it, he thought once again about signing his discharge papers and getting the hell out of dodge.

‘It’s at the National Museum of American History,’ Felix said in a sing-song voice. ‘You love history.’

‘Not _modern_ history,’ said Nate, but already he was thinking that he could stay a week and hit up _all_ the museums, and eat real food, and get a beer with Felix after work, and disappear into crowds of tourists.

‘DC has other museums. It’s a nice city. Anyway, I haven’t seen you in forever.’

‘I’ll think about it, okay?’

In fact, Nate realised as soon as he hung up the phone, he’d already thought about it and the answer was probably yes. Having thrown over the life of the mind for bootcamp, he suddenly craved the academic once more. Before he could think too hard about everything the decision implied, he’d called a local travel agent to book tickets, and then phoned his parents to let them know he’d be visiting a friend for a week. ‘Visiting a friend’ wasn’t entirely a lie, and it would forestall any awkward questions for now.

In the event, leaving Oceanside in jeans and a polo shirt felt like bunking off school. Nate bought a takeout coffee at the airport and sat with his rucksack nestled safely between his feet. At any moment, he expected to hear the strident tones of another officer, or hear a bell or bugle. Sitting with no particular goal other than drinking his latte and waiting to board was anxiety-inducing in its utter tedium.

He pulled a slim guidebook out of the side pocket of his bag and occupied himself by flipping through it and carefully underlining everything he wanted to see.

_My objectives are to visit a friend and see some museums,_ he told himself. _Anything else is a bonus._ Anything like actually enjoying the conference. Anything like stumbling over a sense of certainty in his own near future. Or managing to finally put the inconvenient Dr Bryan out of his mind permanently. Nate was already getting the hang of _that_ problem, anyway. It helped to think of him as Dr Bryan. It helped not to think about the way Dr Bryan had looked at him, right before he grabbed Nate’s arm hard enough to hurt and kissed him like Nate’s mouth was an oasis.

He was just going to enjoy himself. Everyone knew how to enjoy themselves. It wasn’t like fun was _difficult_. Silently to himself he repeated his mother’s refrain from childhood: Nate, you’ll enjoy it when you get there.

Although Nate’s budget hotel was unremarkable, the luxury of real privacy and comfort wasn’t wasted on him in the slightest. And, a couple of miles away, the glossy, historical centre of Washington DC was waiting for Nate and his guidebook. He walked over that first afternoon, the distance nothing at all to him. Things were closing up in the late afternoon. The light was mellowing beautifully, and on outdoor patios and in beer gardens, besuited staffers were drinking and laughing.

Nate walked up and down streets like he was a ghost. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. For the first time in months he was his own man. On a whim, he bought a cone of soft serve which he found he had a genuine appetite for. He sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial like the tourist he was, licking the drips off his thumb and wrist and not thinking about anything at all, any _one_ at all. The sunset reflected off the long pool, getting lower, lower, until finally it was dusk proper and Nate stood up to make the walk back to his hotel.

The air smelled like mown grass. Like coffee shops and bakeries and traffic and dry cleaning stores. Not at all like dust and blood and canvas.

By morning his calm reflection was disrupted by a certain anxiety. In the strange way of such things, he’d realised over his hotel breakfast two things: first, that nobody knew where he was staying, and second, that nobody would notice or care if he didn’t attend the conference. This kind of limbo was unheard of. He tackled the uncertainty by taking out his small notebook and neatly writing the conference title and date on the first free page while he finished his coffee. For some reason this small detail recentred him in his body.

At the museum, a middle-aged woman with a tight perm and enormous plastic-rimmed glasses gently stuck a white printer sticker to his shirt. He had filled his name out in the online registration as NATE FICK and left his affiliation blank. This didn’t seem to be a problem.

‘There you are, Nate Fick!’ she said cheerfully, patting down the edge of the sticker with one finger. ‘The first session starts at nine. There’s tea, coffee and refreshments on the table down the hall. Lunch is at one and will be catered, and if you have any questions talk to one of the museum volunteers in the green t-shirts.’

‘Thanks,’ said Nate, relieved by the clear set of directions. _Time to scout the AO,_ he thought to himself with no little amusement. He moved through the loose crowd of people standing in ones and twos and threes. At the refreshment table, he idly took a chocolate chip cookie and then moved down to the end of the hall, where a large set of windows opened out onto a manicured lawn. It was quarter to nine. Observing the lawn and eating his cookie took two minutes. He went to the washroom, brushed crumbs off his shirt.

_I’m handling it_ , he mouthed to himself in the mirror. _This is going fine._ He had repeated the mantra to himself regularly in bootcamp. It’s potency hadn’t worn off.

It _was_ fine. At least, once the sessions started. The first speaker was visibly nervous but said some interesting things about the presence of women at the negotiation table. (Nate, who had been surrounded exclusively by men for months, nodded and hoped he looked quietly supportive.) Then a pale, slim man who looked like he might blow away in a stiff breeze delivered his talk in a foghorn voice: something about training engineers. His Scottish accent was so strong, though, that Nate could have been wrong.

Nursing, international relations exchange programs, foreign language acquisition; the topics had no particular connection to one another but Nate didn’t care. With everyone seated in tight rows in the large auditorium, folks just had to sit there and listen. Nate found it comforting in its predictability. The only thing missing was Mike by his side to make a quiet comment or a well-timed spit of his dip. He had to repress a smile at the thought of it. He’d only ever seen Mike in uniform.

At lunch Nate, inexplicably hungry, shuffled his way politely towards the catering table. He found himself by the beverages. His bottled water had long since been drunk. He reached out for one of the little white cups.

‘It’s not good coffee.’ The voice came from the other side of the table; deep, a little caustic. Familiar.

Nate froze. He looked up and Tim was there, across the other side of the table. He was wearing a blazer over jeans and a black t-shirt, the time-honoured uniform of the man who couldn’t be bothered to iron a dress shirt for a particular occasion. He no longer looked exhausted. Without his bandana, Nate realised with a little thrill that he was seeing Tim’s hair for the first time—short, dark, unremarkable, but suddenly very remarkable to Nate. He was clean-shaven.

Then Nate remembered that Tim had all but stood him up and that staring adoringly at a guy who was probably a jerk was not a good professional image to project. He cleared his throat, grabbed a cup and a teabag.

‘Tea, then,’ he said. With a brisk movement, he tore open the teabag and then added hot water, curling the tea bag tag around the cup handle. He set the cup on a saucer. Then he took a sugar cookie from a plate and rested that on the edge of the saucer, balancing it all carefully. It needed all of his attention.

When he looked up again, Tim was still there. _Dr Bryan,_ he corrected himself censoriously. Nate drifted along his side of the long table set-up, browsing the food options. It was mostly sandwiches and finger food. He ate his cookie. Blurry at the edge of his field of vision, he could see Tim moving parallel to him. Watching him, hands in pockets.

Nate ate his cookie, faintly warm from the heat of the cup. One-handed, he piled a ham sandwich and some carrot sticks onto a plate that was laughably too small. He balanced an orange between his forearm and his body and backed out of the loose queue of people. Extracting himself without spilling anything, he found himself a quiet corner. Tim fetched up beside him empty-handed and leaned against the wall.

Nate put his cup and saucer down on the floor so that he could take a bite out of his sandwich. The bread felt like it was going to get stuck in his throat. He forced it down, pretending everything was fine. He couldn’t look at Tim. Ignoring him was not a valid long-term strategy, but he didn’t know what to say. Or, he didn’t know how he was going to stop saying things if he started. By the end of his sandwich, he had decided that he would, in a very polite and calm voice, tell Tim that it was good to see him again, but that it was clear that their situation in Iraq had been entirely due to the pressure that they had both been under. That he understood and respected that Tim wasn’t interested, that it was professionally inadvisable for Nate to be interested, and that they should go their separate ways.

There was no need to be unpleasant about it. Or to hurt Tim’s feelings. He was brushing crumbs off his plate when Tim beat him to it.

‘Is this the second phase of the United States Marine Corps’ Middle East strategy?’ asked Tim, standing with his arms folded and watching Nate eat. ‘Figuring out how to fix all the shit you tore up over there? Is that why you’re here, Lieutenant?’

Nate felt a hot flash of anger. _Fuck being polite_ , he thought. _He’s the asshole here._

‘Look at the name badge,’ he snapped. ‘Does it say Lieutenant? I’m not here for work.’ Pedantic correction was the last refuge of the man with no leg to stand on, morally speaking. Nate couldn’t address the rest of Tim’s accusations.

‘You’re here for fun?’ Tim asked. His dark brows were drawn down with confusion rather than anger.

‘You’re not?’ Nate asked. They stared at each other like, Nate thought, a pair of village idiots. Then Tim barked out a short laugh.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘No.’ He pointed to his own badge. ‘I have to make up my annual personal development hours. My boss is speaking, so at least they put me in a decent hotel.’

‘You’d rather be at work?’

‘Obviously.’ Tim grimaced. ‘Better fucking things to do with my time, you know?’

‘Not really, actually,’ said Nate, around a carrot stick.

Tim snorted. Nate’s plate joined his cup on the floor and he peeled his orange. Fresh fruit was still a luxury to him; he loved it more than almost anything and had felt its absence miserably in Iraq. The orange opened like a flower from the pressure of his thumbs, segments separating into a lotus. He offered it to Tim, who shook his head.

‘I’m good.’

Nate ate the orange piece by piece. Now the silence between them felt normal, and not like a conversational no man’s land. All the same Nate had questions, so many questions, and he was worried that if he didn’t take advantage of Tim’s presence now, that the man would disappear again. He lowered his voice so that it would blend into the general hum of conversation around them.

‘At least tell me it was some weird personal shit, and that you’re not secretly married.’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Supermodel girlfriend?’ Nate suggested.

‘It was personal shit,’ Tim said.

‘Okay.’ Nate ate another orange slice. ‘You could have called. Or emailed.’

Tim laughed suddenly, a big, expansive sound from inside his chest. Nate’s mouth twitched in response. ‘With the number or email address you didn’t give me?’

Nate flushed. ‘Oh god,’ he said. ‘I really didn’t—’

‘You weren’t thinking straight,’ said Tim. Nate had just enough time to think that Tim was being pleasantly diplomatic, sparing more of Nate’s blushes, before he carried on with a wicked tone, ‘you’re right, though. I should have driven over to Oceanside from Milwaukee and begged them to let me in. Dramatic fucking tears. Nora Ephron shit.’

‘Oh, that’s how it is?’ Nate asked. Any hope he had of maintaining aloof, dignified distance was, he understood, gone. Once someone started screwing with you, you had to respond.

‘The failure was clearly mine,’ Tim said, with something close to a smirk. _That fucking mouth,_ Nate thought, the fine hairs on the back of his neck and on his arms lifting a little.

‘I can give you my number right now,’ said Nate. ‘Or, you know, we could hang out.’ Hang out, like teenagers. Hang out, like buddies. Nothing came close to what Nate wanted to say. He was fucking everything up, he knew.

‘I need to stay for the keynote,’ said Tim. ‘My boss expects moral support from the front row.’

‘And then?’ asked Nate, trying to recover.

‘I could make it up to you,’ said Tim. ‘I’m staying at the Marriott.’ He gestured vaguely north west.

‘Make it up to me how?’ Nate said. He wished he weren’t eating an orange at a conference centre, most probably with poppy seeds in his teeth. Tim was watching people circulate in the lobby and didn’t look at Nate, but he leaned towards him slightly so that he could speak quietly, without being overheard.

‘Christ, do I have to get out my old anatomy textbooks?’

Nate was well trained in providing a calm response during moments of high tension. His training was not transferring to this area of his life as well as he had hoped. But waiting for the action was always harder than the action, so Nate manoeuvred. ‘Maybe I was thinking about dinner and a movie,’ he said.

‘No, you weren’t,’ Tim said. He gave Nate a sideways look, half-smiling and desperately smug. Nate became aware that around them, people were moving back into the auditorium. He tore his eyes away from Tim’s face and went to put his plates back on the lunch table. At the auditorium door, Tim touched his elbow. ‘Sit with me,’ he said abruptly.

Nate followed him down the tiered steps and they found two seats near the front. He pretended not to notice that Tim, as he sat down, let his knee drag against Nate’s. Or that Tim kept his leg close enough to Nate that he could feel the body heat radiating through both layers of their clothes. Nate couldn’t tell whether or not it was deliberate. All he knew was that he heard very little of Tim’s boss’s presentation. He couldn’t even remember what colour her suit was, or anything about her topic of expertise. He spent the whole 45 minute keynote trying to breathe normally, to look normal.

Only with an heroic effort of will was Nate able to sit next to Tim for the next three hours without constantly casting little glances his way, or finding excuses to touch him. In between each presentation he was able to look, and murmur a comment on the talk just so that Tim would lean in and tilt his head towards Nate to hear better. It showed the muscular line of his neck.

Tim rolled a quarter back and forth over the knuckles of his right hand as he listened. Nate spent a lot of time watching it out of the corner of his eye. He tried not to fidget.

Closing remarks, pleasantries. A mass exodus from the hall, held up by conversations and catching up in the aisles. Nate met Tim’s boss, although what he said to her he couldn’t recall. Much later he would find her business card in his notebook and wonder if he was supposed to email her; so much for networking.

When Tim finally extricated himself and strode towards the exit, Nate was next to him. It was pleasantly warm outside with a beautiful afternoon light.

Nate wouldn’t have noticed if it had been hailing stones the size of grapefruit. He was going back to Tim’s hotel with him. Four hours ago he was trying to forget that the man had ever existed and now he knew, he was sure, that he was going to end up in bed with him. In the nicest hotel Nate had ever been in.

‘The fucking Marriott,’ said Nate, gazing around the lobby. He noticed with satisfaction that he and Tim were walking in step, perfectly synchronised.

‘It’s dumb as hell,’ said Tim. He sounded preoccupied, the irritation reflexive. ‘Our staff travel and expense budget is fucked up.’

Nate felt a weird and irrational burst of joy that stayed with him on the long ride up in the elevator and the silent walk to Tim’s room. It almost drowned out his nervous excitement, the delight at how perfectly Tim it was. A business trip to DC, a night at a fancy hotel and Tim was ten seconds away from a rant about wasteful nonprofit spending. Nate was grinning and he stopped before Tim could notice and ask why.

As the door closed, Tim abruptly turned to him in the confined little space by the bathroom.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I may sometimes be an asshole, but I’m not a cheat. And I would have called.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Yes, you did.’ Tim took off his blazer and hung it on the back of the door. ‘It’s okay. We don’t really know each other.’

Nate felt his chin lifting defensively. ‘I like to think I’m a good judge of character.’

‘I’m just clearing the air,’ Tim said. A little heave of his chest to breathe, about to say something else.

Whatever it was, Nate didn’t want to hear it. He pulled his wallet and cellphone out of his pocket, and his notebook out of the other pocket, and threw all three lazily onto the table by the television. ‘Consider it cleared. Are we doing this, or are we just talking?’

Just like in the hospital so long ago, something about Nate expressing an interest seemed to galvanise Tim to action. He crossed the floor until he had Nate boxed in against the table.

‘You make life difficult, Lieutenant Fick,’ he said, his voice rough and desperate right before his mouth found Nate’s. Nate’s whole body responded; he moaned against Tim’s mouth with an embarrassing, full-body shudder. His hands found Tim’s belt and pulled him in so that Tim would be able to feel how quickly Nate was already getting hard.

They made out messily for a while up against the table. Nate’s hands were locked into Tim’s belt, the backs of his knuckles pressed into Tim’s belly. Tim’s hands wandered up to Nate’s face, around the back of his neck. Felt the topography of his skull and his collarbones, his ribs, his waist. Grabbed his ass.

Only when Nate’s fingers were hurting from the pressure of belt leather and metal did he remember that he could pull Tim’s t-shirt free of his jeans and touch the warm skin underneath. Tim was undoing the tiny buttons of Nate’s polo shirt and untucking it. He pulled it up over Nate’s head, and then Nate had to untangle his arms and get rid of it.

‘You’re too thin,’ said Tim, scrutinising Nate’s chest.

‘That’s, uh, not where I thought the pillow talk would be going,’ said Nate. Tim reached out and ran a professional hand down Nate’s rib cage. Nate started unbuttoning his pants. ‘But since you’re here, doctor, I have this rash.’

Tim rolled his eyes. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he said, proverbially, and broke off to mouth at the line of Nate’s neck in a way that made Nate grab the edge of the table before his knees gave out.

‘Let’s go,’ said Nate, suddenly sick of the banter and the teasing. He shoved his pants down, kicked off his socks. Then they were moving towards the bed, undressing Tim, tripping over a stray shoe, kissing in between steps, everything now very urgent and immediate. Nate collapsed down onto the mattress and luxuriously pressed the soles of his feet into it. ‘Fuck, this is good,’ he said, watching Tim hook his thumbs into his boxers and slide them off. Totally unruffled about getting naked in front of Nate for the first time.

‘Priorities in order, then,’ said Tim, and he flopped down on top of Nate with a deliberate lack of grace.

Nate choked out a laugh that was cut off by Tim’s mouth again, his tongue. He kissed like he talked; with confidence and a firmness that made Nate shiver. Nate hadn’t been kissed in so long. He never wanted Tim to stop; but he did, because he wanted so much more.

‘Wait,’ Nate said, even though it was good, so good; Tim’s weight on him, the hand on Nate’s face—everything that he had feverishly imagined for weeks. Almost everything. Nate rolled Tim off him and slid down his body. ‘I just want—’

He took Tim’s cock into his mouth without even really looking at it. He didn’t care about the details. It was big and it was Tim’s, and when he ran his tongue around the head Tim groaned; that was all he cared about. He couldn’t fit it all in his mouth but he didn’t bother using his hands. He just rested his chin on his forearm, braced over Tim’s trembling thighs, and lapped at it, mouthed the skin of Tim’s balls and inner thigh. Sucked his dick, mouth awkwardly stretched around it, until his chin was wet with spit and he was a little dizzy from not breathing enough.

Nate became aware that Tim was saying something, and reaching down to touch Nate’s face by his jaw.

‘What?’ Nate asked vaguely, pulling off and looking up at him. His ears were ringing. Tim had to repeat himself.

‘You need to—Christ, look at you—you need to stop.’

He pulled Nate up the bed. Nate, alive with restless arousal, put his hand to hand combat training to good use and wrapped his legs around Tim, wrestling with him. Tim laughed, surprised, and pushed back. He was shorter but he was shameless. He bit the side of Nate’s neck until Nate went slack and then shoved him onto his belly.

Nate made a breathless sound into the sheets, a little shocked about how good it had felt; wanted more of it.

'Oh,' said Tim wonderingly, and he did it again harder, pushing Nate's face into the bedsheets with a hand on the back of his neck. Nate found that he was pushing his ass back against the hard line of Tim's cock. Tim retaliated by pulling down Nate’s boxers enough that he could run his hand over Nate’s ass.

Tim’s weight on Nate moved. Tim was leaning over the edge of the bed, fishing around.

‘Come on,’ said Nate. He kicked his underwear off the edge of the bed.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Tim, flicking a couple of condoms at Nate so that they bounced off his arm. He retrieved one, tore it open and put it on. Nate bit the inside of his cheek so that he didn’t beg a medical doctor to bareback him. Tim didn’t seem the type of man to make decisions with his dick. But in his private nighttime imaginings, Tim had always come inside him. Nate wanted that.

He reached under his body, palmed at his cock.

‘That’s lube,’ said Tim, nodding. Nate followed his gaze, picked up the packet. Opened it with his teeth and held it stupidly. Tim took it from him as he settled himself over Nate’s thighs again. His hands were a little rough from Betadine and latex and overwashing, but he was careful as he rubbed wet fingers up between Nate’s ass cheeks. The first light touch over Nate’s hole made him twitch. Then Tim’s finger, in one deliberate slide. Nate pushed back into it. ‘You want more?’ Tim asked him roughly.

‘Yeah.’

Another, tighter, Tim easing his knuckles in. Rocking his hand from side to side. It felt good, better than when Nate did it to himself. Nate resisted the urge to touch himself, knowing he’d get off too fast. Tim flexed his fingers and Nate’s mouth dropped open. Tim was playing with him.

‘Come on,’ Nate said again, his voice thick. It was too soon but he didn’t care.

‘Wait,’ Tim said. He withdrew, and spread Nate open with one hand. A cool trickle of lube, and Tim teasing it into him. Then nothing but his hand there.

‘What’s the hold up?’ Nate knew he was being bossy. Fuck it; he felt like Tim had been engaged in some kind of long-range cock-teasing foreplay since Baghdad.

‘I’m just looking,’ Tim said.

‘Fuck, that’s dirty.’ Nate laughed breathlessly. Wildly he thought to himself _What can I say that will make him do it_. ‘Stop looking and put your dick in it.’

Tim’s breath caught. Almost immediately, the head of Tim’s cock found Nate’s hole. Pressure, and the catch of Tim’s breath. Nate tried to relax. The flow of his blood felt white-hot around his body; his cock ached. Tim’s hand was warm and firm on Nate’s ass, opening him up.

Tim shifted his weight, pushed a little harder. He paused. ‘You okay to do this?’

‘It’s been a while.’ Nate tried to sound nonchalant. What he wanted to say was _I will die of sexual frustration if I don’t get your dick inside me_.

‘We can do something else.’

Nate swallowed, hot all through his chest and up his neck into his face. He pressed his forehead to a cool patch of the pillow. ‘Try it,’ he said, ‘I want you to.’

‘You’re not—’

‘I can fucking take it,’ said Nate. He bent his right knee a little, picturing the visual as if he was watching himself on camera—his legs spreading, his balls, his ass. Tim’s hand ran up the inside of his thigh and back up onto his ass cheek. He rubbed his cock over Nate’s hole a couple of times, then Nate distinctly heard him spit. ‘Fuck,’ he said involuntarily.

Then Tim’s cock was pressed against him again, harder this time, easing into him. The head, thick, pushing through resistance in a gritty drag. Tim stopped and pulled out, and Nate groaned with frustration.

‘I’m not doing this if I’m gonna damage you.’

‘You’re not,’ said Nate. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He propped himself up on his elbows and turned to look at Tim. He had his cock in his hand, idly stroking it as though he wasn’t aware he was doing it.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Tim said.

‘Like what?’ Nate said.

‘Like you want me to hurt you.’

‘Right,’ said Nate, impatience and the wet, bitten curve of Tim’s mouth making it difficult to focus on the conversation. ‘Because the Hippocratic Oath applies here.’

Tim’s hands came down hard on the small of Nate’s back right above his hips, tilting his pelvis so that he was ass-up in the most exposing way. He couldn’t move the way he wanted to, to rub his aching dick against the bed. Tim was leaning his weight down, calling Nate’s bluff. Lining up.

Again the feeling of pressure, and Tim’s shaky breath as he pushed in. Slow again, but not stopping. Nate moaned, caught in between desperation and uncertainty. He wanted to angle himself better but Tim already had him there, pinioned open, lined up perfectly for his dick. It burned, on the edge of too much. No; it was too much. Nate’s fingernails were biting into his palms.

Tim’s thighs met Nate’s, and Nate let out a sobbing breath. Tim was all the way inside him. The thought of it made his cock twitch back to life where it had flagged. They lay like that, Tim giving him time.

‘I thought about this,’ mumbled Nate into the pillow. ‘I thought about it all the time.’ He distinctly felt Tim’s cock twitch inside him. ‘Ah, fuck.’

‘Tell me.’ Tim’s voice wavered only very slightly.

‘It’s so much,’ said Nate nonsensically. He bore down, trying to make it easier. It was almost, almost, he thought wildly. It was fine. He could handle it. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Tim started to pull out with the same agonising slowness.

Nate reached back blindly, somehow wanting Tim’s cock back inside him now, right now. Tim caught his hand and guided it down, down, sliding over lube and skin until Nate’s own fingers were pressed up against his hole. With a surgeon’s precision, Tim angled Nate’s forefingers and slid them inside him. Because Nate had done this before, and so many times, it was automatic for him to rub the pads of his fingers across his prostate in just the right way.

‘Fuck,’ Tim said. He slipped his thumb in alongside Nate’s fingers. Nate cried out, hips grinding against the mattress. ‘You don’t even need my dick.’

‘I do,’ Nate said, eyes closed. He was slowly fucking himself with his fingers. He didn’t care how he looked or sounded. He could hear Tim jerking off with his other hand, and it made him feel as though he were in a race against time. ‘I thought about it,’ he said again. ‘I would’ve fucked you in that storeroom if you’d asked me.’ He licked at the inside of his mouth, where he could still taste Tim’s cock.

In a rush of movement, Tim had Nate’s wrists down on the mattress by his head. As his dick breached Nate’s ass, he leaned down so that Nate could feel his breath when he said, ‘No, you wouldn’t. But we can pretend you would, if you want to play at being a slut.’ Somehow the way he spoke was very crisp and controlled.

Meanwhile, Nate’s exhales were coming out like whimpers. Tim was thrusting slow but deep and Nate’s body, finally, was opening up for him. He would feel it tomorrow. He could feel it now, the endless thick drag that was lighting him up from the inside. He was acutely aware of the sensation of Tim’s cock filling him up all the way down. Usually he would try to apply some strategy, some moves; maybe clenching down on the dick inside him, making himself tighter, or telling the guy _that’s so good, you’re so big_. But they both knew that Nate’s only role here was to breathe through it, to shut the fuck up and take it.

He let it happen. No, he thought, with a thrill; he had made it happen. So that even face down, held down, he still felt powerful. So that he could say anything he wanted, make any noise he wanted, and nothing about it was embarrassing or shameful. It didn’t matter that he was moaning a little on almost every thrust, or that if it went on much longer he was going to come untouched. None of it mattered.

‘Nate,’ said Tim, very low and quiet. Nate could only moan in response and shudder with futile desperation. Maybe the best part was Tim saying his name. And then moaning and tensing because, Nate realised with another rush of joy, Tim was coming. Tim thrust in and held it, grinding up against Nate’s ass. His hands were sweating against Nate’s forearms, but it didn’t matter because Nate was soaked with sweat too, face and back and chest. His weight bore Nate down into the mattress, an agony of delicious pressure that was close, so close to getting him off.

Before Nate could beg him, Tim pulled out with great care. A moment of movement and noise, then Tim’s hand was on the back of Nate’s neck. Nate rolled onto his side so that he could kiss Tim hungrily, and blindly feel for his hands, drawing them down. Instead Tim moved down the bed.

With no preamble, he stuck two fingers back inside Nate and took his cock into his mouth. A rush of blood and sensation, wetness. Nate tried to clench down on Tim’s fingers but he was too sloppy, too loose. The thought of it made him lose it, and he came immediately and without warning.

He cursed, his back arching, and came and came until he was dizzy and gasping. There was an uninhibited joy in privacy, a locked door. Nate didn’t care what he looked like. He shuddered through the end of it and then lay with his eyes closed, panting. Eventually he was able to rub the heels of his hands into his eyes and then over his face. Weakly, he lifted his head and looked at Tim, who was lounging on one elbow and watching him.

‘Jesus,’ Nate said, his voice coming out hoarse and pathetic. Tim flopped down onto his back. He stretched a hand out, resting it on Nate’s shin. They lay there until the air conditioning kicked in with a rattle, and the sweat drying on their bodies made it uncomfortably cool.

Tim rolled off the bed.

‘I’m taking a shower,’ he said prosaically, ‘and then I’m ordering room service.’ He picked up the room service menu and flipped it onto Nate’s belly. Then he smiled, in that strange way he had, almost-awkward. ‘You can join me for either. If you want.’

‘I’m in,’ said Nate. ‘But first I’m gonna put my number in your phone.’

‘You don’t want the Nora Ephron moment?’ Nate watched Tim’s ass flex as he leaned into the bathroom to turn the light on.

‘Next time you go out West, I probably won’t be there any more,’ Nate said. He held his breath. Voicing it made it almost real.

Tim’s smile was totally unguarded. It made Nate feel a little funny, a little tremulous. ‘No fucking kidding,’ Tim said.

‘It’s not official, but I’m going to quit.’ Nate followed Tim into the bathroom, and into the shower. They jammed into the cubicle together and got under the water. The shower was loud and with the water running over Nate’s ears he couldn’t hear what Tim said to him next.

But he knew what it meant when Tim kissed him like that. It meant that everything was going to be fine.


End file.
